Twice each week the faith
healer came to the house, laid his hands upon their backs and took their
money. The treatment afforded Jake a never-ending source of amusement and
in the evening he went through the house putting his hands upon the backs
of the women and demanding money from them, but the dry-goods buyer's
wife, who for years had coughed at night, slept peacefully after some
weeks of the treatment and the cough did not return while Sam remained in
the house.
In the house Sam had a standing. Glowing tales of his shrewdness in
business, his untiring industry, and the size of his bank account, had
preceded him from Caxton, and these tales the Pergrins, in their loyalty
to the town and to all the products of the town, did not allow to shrink
in the re-telling. The housekeeping sister, a kindly woman, became fond of
Sam, and in his absence would boast of him to chance callers or to the
boarders gathered in the living room in the evening. She it was who laid
the foundation of the medical student's belief that Sam was a kind of
genius in money matters, a belief that enabled him later to make a
successful assault upon a legacy which came to that young man.
Frank Eckardt, the medical student, Sam took as a friend.
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